Lovas believes 2014 could be the
year when cloud computing really
takes off as companies seek to make
new technology savings through
hosted services. More than threequarters
of respondents to his survey,
which included investment bank,
asset management, prop trading and
academic community, said they are
thinking about starting to use cloud
technology this year, primarily for
data-intensive back-office processes.
Top among them are data storage
– deemed the most suitable for the
deployment of cloud technology
by 78.2% of those asked – largescale
trade model back testing,
quantitative research, and transaction
cost and post trade analysis.
Interactive Data is already using
the cloud to provide customers
with bulk access to years of tick
data, as well as on-demand tick
and summary information. “Large
extensive data sets are needed for
each of these activities, therefore
enabling access through an ‘ondemand’
utility model through
cloud is a sensible approach,”
said Doe. “These content sets,
packaged together with our ability
to provide small, medium and
large scale hosting deployments
across our global co-location data
centers, provide our customers with
compelling economies of scale.”
The growth of social media as a
tool for FX data dissemination is
also expected to drive take up of
cloud technologies. Market data,
news content and social media
content – all of which are playing
an increasingly important role in FX
trading – were also deemed suitable
for storage and deployment in the
cloud by more-than two thirds of
those surveyed by OneMarketData.
That’s particularly important given
that the use of data from companies
like Twitter and Facebook is
expected to grow exponentially in
the coming years.
TABB Group, in its February report
entitled: Capital Markets Data
Storage; Strategic Imperatives for
a New Computing Era, said some
institutions are also migrating
services such as human resources,
accounting, archiving and disaster
recovery to the cloud. That’s
partly because the cloud offers
a particularly good option as a
standby virtual server environment
for archiving and disaster recovery. It
is also particularly effective for midtier
institutions, who are seeking to
cut costs by bypassing private cloud
investment altogether.
“Rather than incur the costs
of building and maintaining